OTTAWA – The press censor as Canadian hero?
That’s the unexpected conclusion of a new book that lifts the veil on press censorship in Canada during the Second World War, and turns accepted wisdom on its head.
Wartime newspapers, it turns out, were generally timid and supine, content to regurgitate government-approved handouts to fill columns about the war against the Axis powers.
The censors, on the other hand, stood as a bulwark against a total blackout of information demanded by the military. They fought for the rights of newspapers to better inform Canadians about the war effort, including Allied failures – but often were greeted with a shrug by ink-stained editors.
“The censors found themselves in the odd position of fighting the military for the release of information to newspapers that didn’t seem to care whether they got it or not,” author Mark Bourrie concludes in “The Fog of War: Censorship of Canada’s Media in World War Two.”
“On paper, the censorship system had enormous power. In reality, it acted as shepherd to Canadian media that were usually all too willing to play the role of sheep.”
Bourrie, a veteran freelance journalist, says he was surprised about the censors’ quiet courage when he began poring through the archives.
“It was a lot more subtle than I expected,” he said in an interview in the room in Parliament’s Centre Block that was the venue for many wartime censor-press meetings.
Much of the story is focused on Wilfrid Eggleston, the chief English-language press censor, a journalist by profession who later helped teach a new generation of journalists at Carleton University in Ottawa.
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Eggleston regarded the rapid fall of France to the Nazis in the spring of 1940 as a cautionary tale. The French government was so diligent in keeping criticism of war preparations out of newspapers that the French people were lulled into an illusion of security.
“Eggleston believed France had fallen because they lived in a dream land,” says Bourrie.
As chief English censor, Eggleston was determined to allow some bad news in newspaper columns to keep government accountable – and Canada safer. Or as he put it: “We had to be very careful not to allow ourselves to be used by any government department to hide incompetency, cruelty, corruption or other ills.”
Each chapter in “The Fog of War” is built around a key episode of the Second World War. In Atlantic Canada, on the doorstep of the U-boat slaughter of convoys, there was tension about whether to report the ravages on Allied shipping or to keep the attacks secret – the clear preference of navy brass.
“(Halifax censor Bruce) Jefferson quietly wished reporters would challenge the navy’s PR machine,” Bourrie writes. “Instead, they happily accepted the pictures and scraps of news that were handed out by the navy.”
The most compelling tale is the heroic struggle of Tommy Shoyama to publish the fledgling New Canadian, a newspaper for fellow Japanese-Canadians, in the climate of hate and fear on the West Coast that led to the brutal internment of innocent citizens.
British Columbia newspapers railed against Shoyama’s publication, but the censors held their ground, refusing to bend to public opinion and shut it down.
“They (the censors), much more than many of their colleagues in journalism, came out of the internment of ethnic Japanese with relatively clean hands,” Bourrie says.
The censorship system operated quite differently in Quebec, where some French-language publications vocally opposed the war and spoke in support of Nazi-backed Vichy France.
The Liberal government of William Lyon Mackenzie King was fearful of national fractures over conscription and other French-English divides, and Quebec censors often turned a blind eye to pro-fascist screeds.
“Because of the Liberals’ political needs, the censors were a joke among the isolationist Quebec media,” Bourrie writes.
“The failure of the federal government to effectively rein in the worst excesses of the nationalist, anti-participationist press left a stain on the nation’s war record.”
One apparent success of wartime censorship was the ban on stories about Japanese balloon bombs, paper-and-silk devices that floated four days across the Pacific before dropping their loads in North America.
The balloons began appearing in 1944 on the West Coast, and strict censorship was imposed on stories about the numbers or flight paths.
After the war, it was discovered that Japan cut resources for the balloon assault because there was no available feedback about the effectiveness, thanks to censorship.
“The Canadian and U.S. news blackout of the balloon bomb campaign is one of the few proven successes of the censorship system,” Bourrie writes.
Canada’s recent war in Afghanistan has prompted a somewhat different approach to censorship, the author suggests: “These days, the Canadian federal government, like most governments, has chosen to choke off news at the source and to rely on public-affairs officers to shape much of the coverage of military activities.”
“The Fog of War” is being published Aug. 6 by Douglas & McIntyre, which rescued the book after the original publisher, Key Porter, ceased operations last September.
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